We got word yesterday courtesy of Variety that Universal/Comcast is developing an original musical feature based around the songs of Prince. Jokes about Prince discovering that Stellan Skarsgård is his real father notwithstanding, this is yet another sign that the live-action musical is not only a safe genre but is slowly becoming “hot” in terms of studios aggressively wanting to make them. Like the western, the musical (up until recently) was considered a risky or dead genre even though, whenever a major studio made and sufficiently marketed it, said theatrical musical did good-to-great in theatrical box office.

And with A Star Is Born and Bohemian Rhapsody performing like superhero movies and Mary Poppins Returns waiting in the wings, the live-action musical is getting its due respect again. As I’ve noted here and there over the last two years, we’ve had an almost uninterrupted stream whereby we had at least one major musical hit per year, be it a stage adaptation, an original or a musical biopic that banked big on the singer’s respective catalog, going back to 2001 with Moulin Rouge.

And those are just the stage shows. In the realm of original (or not based on a stage show), we’ve had Moulin Rouge! ($179 million worldwide), Disney’s Enchanted ($340m), Disney’s High School Musical 3 ($252m), Sony’s Burlesque ($89m), Disney’s The Muppets ($155m), Lionsgate’s La La Land ($446m) and Fox’s insanely leggy TheGreatest Showman ($434m).

We can debate how to classify Universal’s Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again ($392 million just this summer), since it’s an original sequel to a movie that was an adaptation of a hit stage show. But either way, it counts as a win. And yes, if you count musical biopics or musically-focused flicks, then you must throw on the likes of Ray ($124m), Walk the Line ($186m), the Pitch Perfect trilogy ($588m worldwide), Straight Outta Compton ($161m) and Bohemian Rhapsody ($540m and counting).

There are plenty of barely-released indies (Stage Fright, The Last Five Years, Sing Street, Repo: The Genetic Opera, etc.) and biggies that didn’t quite click (Across the Universe, Rock of Ages, Muppets Most Wanted, Jersey Boys, etc.). We’ll see if Anna and the Apocalypse can survive after its middling four-theater-debut, but the Christmas-set zombie musical dramedy damn well deserves a Hollywood ending.

While not every one of them clicks accordingly, the live-action musical or musical biopic, especially ones with an all-audience appeal (sorry Rob Marshall’s Nine, better luck with Rob Marshall’s Mary Poppins Returns) or concerning rock stars whom fans and audiences want to see in cinematic form (Johnny Cash > Hank Williams), are as safe a bet as any other major genre averaging more than one hit a year for nearly two decades.

By the way, when Bohemian Rhapsody tops $610 million (and I think it will at the rate it’s going), it’ll be the biggest wholly live-action musical ever and the second-biggest somewhat live-action musical ever, right between Mamma Mia! ($609m in 2008) and Beauty and the Beast ($1.263b in 2017). And lest you think that the genre is taking a break next year, we’ll be getting three potentially huge offerings from Walt Disney over the next eight months from the Mouse House with Mary Poppins Returns (December 19, 2018), Aladdin (May 24, 2019), The Lion King (July 19, 2019).

And that’s not even counting their animated Frozen 2 (November 22, 2019) and Universal’s adaptation of Cats opening against Star Wars 9 on December 20, 2019. Nor is it counting Paramount’s Rocket Man, starring Taron Egerton as Elton John in a mid-summer biopic helmed by Dexter Fletcher (the guy who was Bohemian Rhapsody’s relief pitcher after Bryan Singer got fired). And delayed as it may be, Universal is still allegedly making a Wicked movie.

The announcement of this Prince movie, presuming it gets made, confirms that musicals and musical-based features are “in” now. It’s not hard to see why. In an era when folks only go to the movies when there is something they specifically want to see in a theater, the live-action musical is big enough, blustery enough and enough of a communal theatrical experience to justify going to a theater instead of waiting for VOD or DVD.

This also goes back to the idea of audiences not so much rejecting original/new movies so much as rejecting the movie stars that used to get them into the theater in the first place. They didn’t go “Wow, Hitch sounds like such a bold and original movie!” They thought “Hey, that new Will Smith romantic comedy looks fun and charming!”

The likes of The Fifth Element could break out in 1997 not because audiences were more adventurous but because the notion of Bruce Willis in a big-budget sci-fi action movie was enough of a hook for folks to dive into Luc Besson’s original world. That all being said, even if movie stars don’t quite have the draw that they once did, I would argue that rock stars/musicians do have that cachet within certain parameters. So, yes, Freddie Mercury was a “movie star” that turned Bohemian Rhapsody into an event, while Lady Gaga did the same for A Star Is Born.

And that also applies to the songs contained in a given popular musical feature. Whether it’s “The Shallow” from A Star Is Born, “Let It Go” from Frozen or “This is Me” from The Greatest Showman (which, you should recall, only opened with $13.5 million in its first five days), popular in-movie songs can take on a cultural life of their own and increase the must-see factor of a given musical. When the film is based on a real person (or, like Mamma Mia!, incorporates already popular songs), those songs can also qualify as, if not “movie stars,” then added-value elements. Sometimes it’s a star+song combo, like Anne Hathaway tearfully belting out “I Dreamed A Dream” in Les Misérables.

Not only have the likes of A Star Is Born ($193 million domestic/$363m worldwide-and-counting) and Bohemian Rhapsody ($162m/$540m-and-counting) vastly overperformed, but they have passed or will pass the respective domestic and/or global totals of the likes of Ant-Man and the Wasp ($216m/$620m), Venom ($212m/$844m) and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald ($136m/$530m-and-counting). And, as I’ve noted before, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if Bryan Singer’s Bohemian Rhapsody ended up earning more worldwide than Simon Kinberg’s X-Men: Dark Phoenix when the latter opens next summer.

The splashy musical (or musically-powered drama) automatically comes with an added-value element (the songs) or two (famous musicians in the movie or being portrayed in the movie). They are big enough to justify a theatrical engagement and balance the line between melodrama and escapism that audiences so clearly crave from the modern theatrical experience. We may be reaching a point where the live-action musical (and you can debate to what extent the heavily FX-driven Walt Disney remakes count as “live-action,” but I digress) as a sub-genre is the next-safest bet next to a superhero flick or a responsibly-budgeted horror movie.

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I've studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for 28 years. I have extensively written about all of said subjects for the last ten years. My outlets for film criticism, box office commentary, and film-skewing ...